Over the past decades studies of Victorian crime and criminality have proliferated, focusing critical attention on the entangled relations of discipline, power, and scientific discourse in nineteenth-century Britain. Largely indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, particularly Discipline and Punish, such scholarly work has emphasized the ways that Victorian narratives work to stabilize existing modalities of social power by containing and explaining the criminal “other.” Working against the grain of such readings, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller traces the career of a heretofore unnoticed figure in criticism of crime and crime fiction: the New Woman criminal. Unlike the pathologized male criminals central to scientific, legal, and cultural discourse in the years between 1880 and 1914, Miller suggests, fictional constructions of the New Woman criminal posit a figure “more successful, more admirable, and altogether less prone to containment and arrest” (5). Such representations not only unseat critical assumptions about the cautionary tenor of crime fictions, Miller argues, “they also celebrate the pleasure of such transgression” (5).

Taking as her focus the cultural work performed by fictional representations of the New Woman criminal, Miller traces the career of a figure who naturalized the early effects of modernity, including “changing political and social conditions, changing gender roles, and changing definitions of `public’ and `private’” (3). Unlike the historical New Woman who engaged fears about expanding political and social roles for women, Miller argues, the New Woman criminal reconstitutes such fears in light of consumerist discourse. Where the New Woman was often caricatured as mannish, then, the New Woman criminal expressed the consumer ideal that women can gain power by manipulating the visual signifiers constitutive of image. Where the male criminal offers a focus for the disciplinary effects of science, she suggests, the New Woman criminal promotes a “consumerist” model of identity that reveals “the freewheeling power of image and style in a modern, consumerist, and image-centered society” (5–6). As a focus of fictional work in detective series, early film, and “dynamite narrative,” Miller claims, the New Woman criminal expressed the glamour and power of femininity in an increasingly public, visual, amoral, and image-centered society.

Analysis of the New Woman criminal in Framed is divided into three sections, each of which focuses on representational strategies within a different genre. The first section takes up detective series that became popular in magazines following the success of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in the early 1890s. Contrasting the anxious, often conflicted, representations of female criminality as a foil to fantasies of male surveillance in Doyle's oeuvre with intersections of imperialism, consumerism, and feminism in L. T. Meade's 1902–3 series, The Sorceress of the Strand, Miller highlights the ways that new expressions of visuality (via illustration) express a version of femininity that strains against the late Victorian tenor of these texts. The second section, which draws on original archival research on crime films produced in England between 1896 and 1913, focuses on the relationship between gender and class politics in early film. Considering how female thieves in early fictional film challenge the “detective-centered” focus of crime fiction—offering a consumerist argument for equal access to luxury goods—Miller offers insight into ways working-class sensibility were integrated with the consumerist values of modern capitalism. As a counterpoint, she examines films documenting the violent collective action undertaken by militant suffragettes, who were represented in ways that differentiate them categorically from the “glamourous thieves” central to fiction film (20). In the final section, Miller takes up representations of female political criminals in “dynamite narratives” by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Olivia Rossetti and Helen Rossetti, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson. Situating these high-cultural works in relation to the popular forms examined in earlier sections, she explores fears about “the feminization of public culture via consumerism” and the “uncomfortable sense of public/private interconnectedness embedded in modern terrorism” (21–22).

The scope of Miller's primary and secondary research in Framed is impressive, as is her ability to communicate a clear, coherent line of argument that illuminates so many divergent aspects of late Victorian and early twentieth century culture. By situating the New Woman criminal in the context of new genres that emerged in response to, and registered the shock of, changing social norms and technological modes at the fin de siècle, Miller is able to isolate and meticulously contextualize both the ways that visuality and femininity were connected in new ways at the end of the Victorian era and to productively engage neglected visual texts including magazine illustration and film. In shifting the emphasis from mid-Victorian equations of femininity and domesticity, moreover, Miller reveals how seemingly conservative, disciplinary texts such as the Sherlock Holmes stories register the emergence of modern countertexts of gender. If Framed offers invaluable insights into the interrelationships between gender and genre at the fin de siècle, however, it also commands attention as a study that both demonstrates and theorizes the interconnected character of “high” and “mass” forms of culture at the end of the nineteenth century, via insightful readings of canonical works such as The Princess Casimassima and The Secret Agent, as well as neglected texts such as Wilde's Vera; or, the Nihilists and hitherto unexplored examples of early film. Indeed, though its focus on a single figure, the New Woman criminal, would seem at first glance to limit its interest to specialist readers, Framed is essential reading for students of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—accessible enough to be useful for senior undergraduates and sophisticated enough in its approach to suggest new and exciting lines of research for scholars of the Victorian and fin de siècle eras, Modernism, and film studies.